#pining hell

[lesbianwives]

You learn several things that day. Step I: Start with a strip of paper, about 11 inches long. The first is that there is something painful about paper in your best friend’s hands. The way she bends and folds. Her fingers moving, delicate. The nearly inaudible crackle of a creased, college-ruled page. It makes you wistful. Step 2: Tie a knot in the end of your paper. Pull gently to tighten, then flatten it. The second is that you are clumsy. You haven’t always been so. In fact, you are usually quite graceful. So why the sudden tremor in your hands? Why the mess you’re making of your white paper strip, as complaint in your best friend’s hands as it is disobedient in yours? You know exactly why.   Step 3: Fold the end of the strip down and tuck it into the knot. The third thing you learn is that you loathe origami. It was a mistake to let her show you how, here in this room where there is nowhere for your feelings to run to. Those terrible radiant things. Those deathless hopes. You hate them, almost as much as origami. Step 4: Wrap the other end of the strip around and around this pentagon you have formed, creasing gently as you go. The fourth is that you are never going to make a lucky paper star. It is impossible. Your best friend is already finishing hers, pressing its angular edges until they become concave. Her lovely fingers. Your damaged star. These facts you cannot bear. Step 5: Keep wrapping until you get to the end of the strip. Tuck in the end. The fifth is that the universe is mocking you. Your fingers fumble with your paper strip, bending and creasing in all the wrong ways. You want to make this star, desperately, awfully. But you can’t. You don’t. The paper sits ruined in the palm of your hand. Step 6: Very gently and slowly use your fingernail to press on the center of each of its edges. A star should form. The sixth is that this is a metaphor. She can’t. She doesn’t. The paper sits ruined in the palm of your hand.

lucky paper star

[lesbianwives]

That song, that awful terrible song. The absurd sting. The foolish decision. The irony of it all. Me, staring down at the black and white grin of the piano keys, every atom in my body screaming with Awareness Of You. If I didn’t look at you, not even once. If I kept my gaze elsewhere. If I leveled my tone to a sedated monotone. If I talked about pace and rhythm and chorus and speed up there and slow down here and yes, yes, like that, beautiful. If I didn’t watch your hands on the bow or the bow on the strings or the light on your face. If I crushed those violets of want blooming in my belly. If I built myself a castle of steel through which you could never penetrate, maybe, maybe, I could reach a quivering sort of equilibrium. But that song. The melody mocking me, mocking my heartache, pointing to my hidden places and yanking the curtain aside. It shouldn’t have been romantic, not the stone in my chest, nor the frigid fact of my unreciprocated feelings but god, the room shrank until it seemed as if you had hollowed me out and saturated me with yourself, that the end of me and the beginning of you had become completely indistinguishable, my heartbeat so loud we should have heard it echo off the walls. That song and that glow and that loss. That soft desire, that song I should never have suggested we play, that ruin. That song and you and you.

DUET